On 16 February 2018, the Supreme Court lowered the amount of Cauvery water due to Tamil Nadu, to 404.25 tmcft (thousand million cubic feet), from the 419 tmcft allotted by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal in February 2007. The Court allotted Karnataka 270 tmcft of Cauvery water, which is 14.75...

Discussion Map

In this feature, we map the discussion around Partha Chatterjee’s 2008 article “Democracy and Economic Tranformation in India” on the operation of the civil and political society. This debate took place in the wake of the violence at Nandigram, West Bengal in 2007.

Chatterjee writes that there is now a new dynamic logic that ties the operations of “political society” (comprising the peasantry, artisans and petty producers in the informal sector) with the hegemonic role of the bourgeoisie in “civil society”.

John and Deshpande, in their article, find that the most important question to ask of a theory such as Chatterjee’s, is not whether it is accurate or comprehensive, but whether it is useful to think with—or against.

Chatterjee responds to the questions raised by Shah, John and Deshpande, and Baviskar and Sundar. He says, “The question posed in DET was: are we seeing the dissolution of the Indian peasantry? The answer was: because of the politically regulated process of the reversal of the effects of primitive accumulation, the peasantry is not likely to be dissolved.”